THE ROMULUS PROJECT

1. The heart of the ROMULUS system is the Latin texts with commentaries. At the present time all editions printed 75 years ago are in public domain, so there is a wide choice of legally available texts, which the new generation of text-scanners can convert to electronic text with great accuracy. First, we plan to select reliable older texts for scanning, or where possible lease electronic text from various sources, but our editing scholars can add or substitute variant readings which they consider important. For the Classical period, from Comedy through 2nd c. A.D., the amount of text is not large, it is actually less than a bookshelf of printed texts.

2. Two areas, often not generally accessible for students, are
   
   • the monumental world of Latin inscriptions, which shed light on social history as well as public and legal matters, and
   • the developing world of Christian thought and writings. A delectus from the delectus of Dessau is feasible, but it should be accompanied with an expanded epigraphical, social and historical commentary to be useful. It is essential to include Christian authors, from the classical Minucius Felix through Tertullian and on to Augustine, along with the Itala and/or Vulgate translations of the Bible. Church Latin is without question a crucial part of the Latin experience.

3. We plan to have translations available with the Latin texts, but unlike the Loeb series, our EBook system stacks the translation page facing the text with several layers, which instantly toggle on/off to display pages of: Reading-notes, Essays, Litera ry Commentary, Scholarly detail, and Bibliography or summaries of studies. These pages accompany the Latin text page by page; each supplementary page is a second away from being summoned to the front. By electronic 'layering' of the pages, the reader can leaf through supplementary material, with the Latin text always in sight.

   This new format avoids pages of heterogeneous footnotes crowding the text or excursuses and appendixes at the back of the book. Everything relevant is at the fore, right next to the text.

4. Vocabulary is always the besetting problem for language students, who can learn grammar as a system, but not vocabulary, which is an on-going and troublesome continuum. Thumbing through paper dictionaries has been the bane of eager minds for centuries ; now we can provide an instantaneous Latin dictionary, with brief and definitive definitions in clear and current language. Words can be summoned up by clicking on a text-word, so the dictionary search, which took minutes before, now takes seconds. Faste r learning and faster reading are clearly possible with better tools, and we can hope that Latin students will in the future begin to read Latin almost as easily as they read French. A compact dictionary of this sort has been prepared and proofed, and is available for use on screen simultaneously with the ROMULUS texts.

5. A built-in grammar is a necessity, with examples of each item discussed, exemplified in good Latin writing, with quick links from the text for students and a grammar-search system for more advanced readers. The out-of-copyright grammar of Lane has exc ellent illustrations in Latin with English translation, and can be used entire, with appropriate search-mechanisms.

6. An encyclopedia of Classical information is necessary, for which we plan to use all the Classical articles from the out-of-copyright 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1910. The signed articles in that edition are excellent, the uns igned ones quite good, and the quality is evidenced by the fact that no good academic library fails to have a copy of this edition in its Reference Section.

7. A detailed set of maps will have to be organized, with large zoom in-and-out capabilities. Much work has been done with ancient maps, but maps focusing on certain areas in specific time-periods will require further, detailed scholarship. Fortunately t here are cartographic experts in this area. Maps are ipso facto cost-effective since they are basically line-drawings which do not consume excessive bytes.

8. A great deal of the art of the ancient world has been incorporated in the magnificent video-disc published by Yale for use with the Greek Perseus Project. We can use their video-disc for Greek art, which is basic to Roman art, but for specifically Rom an, Etruscan and Christian art we may want to develop electronic pictures at a later date. However by restricting ourselves initially to text, we make our project smaller, cheaper and certainly much more feasible economically.

• Brilliant as Perseus has been with art materials, it has not been effective in dealing with the literary materials. The Greek texts with their often nondescript translations, are mere reprints from eighty years of Loeb history. No commentary has been added, nor regular readings of textual variants. The visual materials have been given a wonderful treatment, but Greek Literature, which is certainly the jewel of the Greek experience, has been sadly neglected.

• Cost is critical. Over the years Perseus has proved very expensive. We believe ROMULUS can be done economically by staying mainly with text materials, with careful administrative planning by a core Board of Editors, working c losely with a range of university graduate departments. (More on costs and funding below...)

1. Administration must be kept to a minimum. A director of planning, an administrative director, an editing director are needed, while all subsequent work done for the ROMULUS Project should be done on a contract or third-party basis, paid for with grants or fees, while the copyright for work done remains permanently with the Project.

2. Contract work is eminently feasible at the present time. There are scholars who can use supplementary income, there are Ph.D. holders and advanced graduate students who do not have positions and are seeking employment in Classics part time, as an alte rnative to seeking another work. And there are established scholars who can review contract-work as it is done, make suggestions and reject insufficient work, on an hourly consultation fee.

   In other words, we see as practical a widespread network of people working on specific sections of text, for example the first book of Horace's Odes which has some 33 poems, or Vergil's Aeneid Book I, designed for school and college use. Fol lowing a prepared sample text, the scholar can prepare his 'section' for review, and if all is approved he can undertake another section. Graduate students in good universities are probably the best prepared persons in the world to work on developing a ma trix of translation, comment and scholarly detail, mainly because the materials are fresh in their minds, and they are not yet worn down by interminable committee duties in their colleges. Writing new commentary for students might well come from the gener ation nearest them in age.

3. What is needed in terms of what appears on the screen?

   The screen itself should be the largest size currently common at the time the project is expected to be completed. The 15-inch screen is becoming ubiquitous, and opens up much more 'real-estate' for text and commentary. We can now have two pages of text v isible at the same time, a basic necessity for a commented Latin text.

   At the present time such a display cannot be used on the WWW, but we believe that with further work on cross-platform considerations, the web format will be expanded to a larger display and multiple-page formatting. A number of programmers are working on this at the present time.

   ROMULUS has available a new format called EBook, designed for the 15-inch screen. At the present time it uses the Mac Hypercard system, but can later be converted to PC with Hypercard-emulating programs. EBook puts the Latin text on the left page with a translation facing it, not unlike the Loeb format. But behind the right page are five (or more) 'layered' pages, appearing instantly when a selector button at the bottom of the window is pressed. These layered pages can be used fo r any special purpose, and additional layers can be added. As a suggestion, these page-assignments seem workable for ROMULUS:

   Unchanging page   Layered pages
      
   LATIN TEXT        TRANSLATION
                        NOTES
                           LITERARY COMMENT
                              REFERENCE MATS.
                                 APP. CRIT. 
                                     QUOTED ESSAY
                                        A  personal NOTEPAD
   

   This is a complex and sophisticated format, which can replace the crowded 'variorum' page with its endless footnotes. It brings to the reader's attention what is needed instantly and is completely editable at the keyboard with no more expertise than is us ual for word processing. This makes EBook text editable for entering extended material or for personal use.

1. First the electronically prepared text is entered on the left hand page, a standard text or one with alternative readings if desired. On the right hand page a translation is entered, for our purposes it can be a new translation or possibly one electro nically copied and edited up from an available 19th c. Bohn or Harpers Series translation. Since we are aiming at a basic prose translation as aid to the reader, and not at 'art translation' which is an entirely different matter, many of the old students' translations can be usable with some changes. In some cases an old translation will be excellent, e.g. Conington's prose translation of Vergil from mid 19th c., a masterpiece of subtle translation/commentary. There may be need to change a word or phrase, or break up a long sentence into short ones for modern readers, but this can be done deftly with modern editing techniques.

2. Serving as an alternate behind this 'translation page', we have a second 'layered' page with the kind of notes students need, pointing out the details of grammar they miss generation after generation. The old Ginn textbooks have much material which ca n be used here, but a teacher who has taught Latin for a few years knows precisely what is required for his students. This page can be oriented toward beginning-to-intermediate students, that is upper high school through second year college Latin. More ad vanced students students can skip this page if they find it redundant, since it only appears when you ask for it.

3. Another selectable page of 'Commentary' represents the talents and taste of the editing scholar at work. This page can include background materials, as well as comments on literary matters, the quality of poetic wording and the way the poet's mind is turning. For this Commentary we need a scholar tuned to esthetic detail, to the fine points of the literary tradition in a historical setting. Here the watchful eye of the ROMULUS Review Board is essential, not to edit every line of comment, but to adumbrate at the start overall parameters for the project.

4. Another page can be oriented to the needs of the advanced student, to sketch out the kinds of things covered in a good graduate seminar. There is much material buried in L'Année Philologique or the electronic TOC from Toronto which a fac t-oriented scholar can elicit and abridge for the intelligent student/reader. How much detail is enough? The 'layered' scrolling page can be seen as a sensible size, with its 30K limit!.

5. A page for the 'Apparatus' can be developed to include textual variants and scholiastic comments. If presented succinctly, these materials should give a sense of the two thousand years of copying and commenting which accompanies the canon of every Cla ssical author. The general literary reader may not wish to look in here, but this material should be included and available.

6. Linking to a composite encyclopedia in ROMULUS is not difficult, since there are names for most articles, and further indexing to keywords can be done later. Linking to maps is a special matter, and must be entrusted to the p erson in charge of a substantial Map Project. Linking to pictures of art, archaeology and sites is a matter which must be left to the specialist in this area. Linking to the Latin Grammar can best be done by a table-of-items, connecting to a search for se ctions, again a detailed but not difficult project. Linking to the Humanist Latin Dictionary, mentioned elsewhere in this paper, is valuable for readers at any stage.

7. A Latin Electronic Dictionary is already completed and available for use with ROMULUS. It contains all the 15,000 words used in Latin literary texts, down to the hapax level, and works efficiently by typing a word, or part of a word, into a dialog box. The search is completed in a few seconds, after which a click returns the reader to the Latin text which remains in view. As a future convenience, it will be possible to connect the text automatically to the dictionary, so that the reader can search a word in the dictionary by merely clicking on it.

• It can be done through a cooperative Consortium of a number of universities which have interested Classics staff and Latin graduate seminars from which to draw materials with grad-students' aid in preparing text and commentary materials. Because of th e ease of working with the EBook format, no expert computer knowledge or programming expertise is needed for compiling and entering materials.

• Or it can be done by seeking Foundation support and funding, much as Perseus did when it started out in the early 1980's. When dealing with dollar funding, the approach must be exact, with projections of costs, time frame for completion, and final use and distribution of the materials produced.

Consider for a moment the range of potential users for a low-cost, high quality program like ROMULUS.

1. There are at present some 175,000 Latin students in public high school with an equal number in private and parochial schools. Most of these enrollments are in the first three years, with only 20,000 pursuing Latin into the fourth year, the Vergil leve l, which is unfortunate. (It is like studying Italian intensively and stopping just short of Dante...)

   By designing some materials suitable for the high school level -- a beginning level, an easy prose level, a harder level with optional poets, and a college level -- we foresee a reasonably large body of users. There still exists in many high schools a 'tr aditional' sequence, with grammar/language first year; Caesar for the second year with student-notes, perhaps a commentary by a retired military person, with abundant maps; an introduction to Cicero not only as orator but as letter-writer and man; and fin ally the great artist, Vergil.

2. In the colleges there are some 20,000 students of Latin although some feel that this is a low figure. There are also many persons, some in later life, who have taken up the study of Latin again, and of course there are English teachers and modern lang uage scholars who would have immediate use for a Latin program as open and user-friendly as ROMULUS.

   Some of the upper level high school material is suitable for a first or second year college course, but to be used at a faster pace, and followed by literature more suitable for college students -- Horace's Odes and Satires, the scientist Lu cretius, Ovid, Pliny as judge and epistolographer, and of course Tacitus. A course on Satire can be organized about Horace, Juvenal and Persius with up-to-date commentary. Roman Comedy is a field unto itself, as remarkable in its style and flow, as in its vast effect on post-Renaissance European comedy. With such materials at hand, much of the old 3/4 year college Latin major program can be re-established if materials and interest coincide, using modern commentary, electronic dictionary, and links to the historical tradition.

3. In short, a reasonable public use should exist for ROMULUS, given proper marketing techniques and a solid business approach. This can be done on a not-for-profit basis, but if continued research and work on the 'product' is f elt necessary, it may be necessary to consider ROMULUS as a 501(c)3 Public corporation, so that legitimate profits can be plowed back into its operation, thus cutting it free from the need for continual funding which besets many a good academic project. One of the serious disadvantages of a program operating under the traditional academic shelter is the fact that almost half of the funding of such sheltered projects is known to be currently consumed by the sheltering institution. Since these matters cannot be determined at the outset, either financially or legally, options for the exact implementation of the ROMULUS project should be left open as long as possible.

4. A question has been raised whether publication should be on the web, or on CD ROM. An up-to-date sense of computer technology favors the web, as being available world-wide, and continually editable from the parent server. On the other hand an inexpens ive CD ROM makes the material available to those not web-connected, e.g. many smaller schools and colleges, those with crowded terminal facilities, and some commercial services which do not have access to all server facilities. The web use is free by its nature, whereas small profits from sale of CD ROM can be put back into a continued ROMULUS operation.

   Until Netscape makes provisions for complex, formatted texts like the EBook, it can present only pages of plain text and then link these to secondary materials. The remarkable facilities which EBook offers are lost on the Web, but EBook files on the Web c an be downloaded for later use. This is, however a complicated and indirect use of the multiple levels of commentary which ROMULUS is planning.

   But there is no reason to decide on either Web or CD ROM. The costs of putting text on CD ROM is not large, and it may be found feasible to publish all materials on both systems. But a major decision like this warrants further information and careful disc ussion.

The above material was begun after attending the CALICO Computer Aided Language Conference which was held in the spring of l995 at Middlebury College. The Conference displayed the wide range of materials and projects with electronic media which can be use d for better teaching of languages. I was apparently the only Classicist attending. During the summer of l995, I worked out details of the EBook concept and developed a working template, after which the parts of what I called the ROMULUS< /strong> plan began to fall into place.

Just as arrangements were being made in March l996 for putting this material on the web, Perseus' plans for a Latin Project were announced. This was welcome news, since Perseus has shown expertise in dealing with high quality pictures and materials to sup plement the teaching of Greek culture. On the other hand, there might well be fear that a Latin Perseus would come up with wonderful visual materials, but bare Latin texts without language and literary commentaries for students of Latin as Latin, not in t ranslation.

Hence it seemed appropriate to append a few general remarks:

1. The swing toward visual impressions is part of the TV-based world we live in. No longer is a picture worth a thousand words, but there is question if the words have much meaning anymore. Think of the vague and fuzzy wording of politics, or the world o f advertising.

   On the other hand, with serious use of computers, a generation of people is appearing up who realize that ideas are in Plato's sense ideas, the DNA of Mind, as it were. Chasing and processing data, or constructing a complex interlocked sc ript, we move into a world where there is little image relevancy beyond a few icons on screen, and very few words to describe the world in which we are working.

   When you ask someone working a complex computer problem what he is doing, you get mumbles and chopped words -- because they are in the world of pure thought, not words.

   But words are a critical part of the operation of the human brain, one of its distinguishing characteristics. Close and slow language study, in one's native language or not, re-focuses the mind on the chunks of encapsulated meaning we call words. We have all seen that serious Latin students, where hard learning is still valued, seem to do well later in other things later, not only writing, but also in law and science. There may be some self-selection here, but part of it is in the close a nd hard attention paid to the building blocks. Language is not the only human tool, but it is one which this generation seems to be consistently undervaluing.

2. Suggestion for any new project in Latin:
   • Continue with the visual materials with the expertise Perseus has developed over the last dozen years. This part is well done and firmly in hand.
   • Develop the literary and text aspects of the new program separately, put its direction in the hands of a Board of ten solid and representative Classics scholars, who can ensure that the work with the text and comment is the best show that we can have as this century ends. Some philology is by its nature dry and inaccessible, but much is basic and needed for the understanding of difficult parts of many texts. If the body of Classical learning, as it has developed since the days of Mommsen, is cut out f rom public awareness now, it will probably never recover.

3. Philology, seen as intense, research-oriented language study, does a double duty:

   First, it provides information, bringing often unsuspected and recondite information necessary to the interpretation of written materials. Writing from another culture, especially from another culture in another time-frame, often cannot be "read" ; as it stands. Words and notions go through elaborate changes in time; a detailed study of these changes in necessary for understanding non-native texts.

   It also concentrates attention minutely on individual lines, words and sounds, even when the process seems dry or overly detailed. Reading at today's prose rates, we winnow meaning out of the chaff of the words; that's usually the way we read novels or as signed college readings. But when one reads art-writing, especially poetry, the meanings are intertwined with the form and sounds of the words, which is why Frost rightly remarked: Poetry is that which disappears in translation.

   A careful approach to literature has to begin somewhere in the high school years to take firm root. (The same would be true of math: if you don't get a good sense of algebra early, it will probably not become a useful tool in later education.) Many high s chool and college courses do not demand this kind of close attention, they are often discursive, intended to expose students to new areas of consideration. This has great value overall, but when it starts to replace the "hard" courses, which stu dents often shy away from for perfectly natural human reasons, it establishes a wrong twist in the process of learning.

   Latin has broad cultural meaning, but it also has a tradition of focusing the mind on detail. A first-rate Classics college major often becomes a first-rate in other, unrelated areas. Was it the innate mind, or the Latin training?

   Of course it was both.

4. Perseus has been unusually effective in bringing interesting supplementary materials to high school and college courses. If wide use of supplementary material finds its way into courses in English translation, that is to be expected in a country where over ten times as many students study Greek or Latin in English as compared to those working with the languages.

   At the same time, teaching materials in Latin are disappearing. A few popular textbooks which sell widely are available, but most Latin authors outside the basic canon have disappeared entirely. Without new inputs into available commentaries from working scholars of our own time, the books high school and college students use often seem hopelessly outdated, reflecting the Classicism of sixty years ago.

   The wide use of interesting supplementary material relating to the Classics must bear the burden of also producing first-rate new literary and cultural commentaries associated with language texts. If this is not done, the supplem entary materials will become the primary materials -- and study of original language texts will eventually disappear.